Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!usc!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: ssimmons@unix.cie.rpi.edu (Stephen Simmons) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Book of Mormon Message-ID: Date: 8 Aug 90 07:17:23 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: CIE, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY Lines: 53 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article swindle@spanky.stanford.edu writes about the Mormon church: > Without bogging you down with too much doctrinal detail, >here are some important points about the book and the church: >1) we believe that both the Bible and the Book of Mormon are > scripture, and are literally the word of God. The Bible, > however, because of thousands of years of translation, re- > translation, and mis-translation, necessarily contains many > errors. We believe that one of the purposes of the B of M > coming forth in our day was to clarify the gospel of Christ, > and serve as a second witness to His divinity (\ie "in the > mouths of two witnesses shall the truth be made known ... "). I think the case about errors in the Bible is a little overstated...The English Bible has (except in very early times) been translated from the Greek and the Hebrew; most copies of the Bible (I would suppose) have been translated only once; that is, they have been translated from Greek/Hebrew/Aramaic --> English/German/French/etc. There is only one translation step here. A retranslation merely means that scholars took a more exacting look at the original text and attempted to improve the quality of earlier translations. A retranslation *improves* the quality of the text, normally. Re-translations normally fix mis-translations in previous versions. The few errors in the Bible (say, as compared to most other ancient writings) are do to copyists mistakes. If you want some quick, hard facts about the manuscripts of the Bible, check out Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol. I, chapters 3 & 4 (I think). If you want to look carefully at the books that were included in the Bible as well the various translations of the renaissance and the modern age, check out the Canon of Scripture, by F.F. Bruce. I've heard, but not read, of a book about the Manuscripts of the Bible by F.F. Bruce. I'm sure that many other books could be recommended too. I think that after reading these books that you will find that it is difficult to argue that there are many errors in the Bible. A few, but not many. A Mormon friend of mine says that he trusts the Bible over the Book of Mormon because the Bible has been out in the open and under scrutiny for 2000 years or so. It has been tested for thousands of years, quite literally. It has withstood the test of time. What I have found fascinating is the vast number of places where the Bible agrees with itself. There are a lot of parallel passages in the Bible (i.e. the Gospels; Samuel & Kings vs. Chronicles & Isaiah; etc.). In many of these cases, we have entire passages repeated word for word. Furthermore, Numbers 7 is a classic example of an entirely different kind of redundancy: where a list of items is given with its total. In this case, as in all the others that I have examined, the total matches the sum of the items in the list, and therefore we can be quite confident in stating that the text is correct... --Stephen Simmons